1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing system and an image processing method which perform image processing using a texture.
2. Related Background Art
Texture data is widely used to express texture of the surface on an object. Different texture data are pasted on an image of the same object to give a completely different impression to the object image in texture, thereby a three-dimensional image having perception of depth.
In three-dimensional image processing, a curved surface is expressed by sets of polygons. However, in actual drawing, each of the polygons is decomposed into pixels.
In order to increase the speed of the three-dimensional image processing, a plurality of different pixels are desirably processed in parallel to each other. For this reason, there has been proposed a method of speeding up image processing by processing a plurality of blocks in parallel in units of a block consisted of a plurality of pixels (U.S. Pat. No. 6,532,013). However, to perform drawing in one block, there is a case where pixel information in the other block is needed. For example, there is a case where color in one block affects color in the other block. Image processing cannot be performed in parallel for the blocks having such dependence. For this reason, even if parallel processing is possible, the parallel processing cannot be actually performed in many cases.
When image processing is continuously performed to the same pixel, the image processing can be smoothly performed because the operation frequency of a conventional image processing processor is not very high. With a recent image processing processor having a high operation frequency, it would be difficult to perform the image processing.